An Italian proverb about Cornwall

The Falmouth Sail Training Ship 'Hardiess' sailing into St Mawes Harbour - by Rod Allday [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

"'He doth sail into a Cornish port without a bark.'

It is and Italian Proverb, where it passeth for a description (or derision) of a man as is wronged by his wife's disloyalty.  The wit of it consists of an illusion to the word Hora."

Ray 1768



[So - not really Cornish - but worth including here I think! I am guessing the Hora bit comes from the italian word for Cornish - I cannot find it online.]

Saint Cleer, Liskeard

"The well of St. Cleer, the baptistery or chapel by which it was enclosed, and an ancient cross about 9 feet high, form a group by the roadside 100 yards eastward below the church, north of Liskeard. The chapel was destroyed by fanatics in the Civil War, but appears to have been similar in size and construction to that which now stands by Dupath Well, near Callington. It was restored in 1864 as a memorial to the Rev. John Jope, sixty-seven years Vicar of St. Cleer. The well is said to have been once used as a boussening or ducking pool, for the cure of mad people. Attempts have from time to time been made to cart away some of the stones of the chapel, but mysterious power has always returned them at night. The entrance is under two low round arches, the roof covered with ivy and brushwood. The water flowing out of the well fills a pool or basin, supposed to have been used as a boussening pool for curing mad people. St. Clare was born about 1200, in Italy, and died 1252. She became the abbess of a monastery of Benedictine nuns, and was foundress of the order of the Poor Clares.--E. Ashworth, Esq."

Hope 1893

Map - St Cleer's Well
Map - Dupath Well

Merrymaids and Merrymen part 2

"...The Irish legends make us acquainted with the amours of men with those sea-sirens. We learn that the Merrows, or Moruachs, came occasionally from the sea, and interested themselves in the affairs of man. Amongst the fragments which have been gathered, here a pebble and there a pebble, along the Western coast, will be found similar narratives.

The sirens of the Aegean Sea--probably the parents of the medieval mermaid--possess in a pre-eminent degree the beauty and the falsehood of all the race. Like all other things, even those mythical creations take colour from that they work in, like the dyer's hand. The Italian mermaid is the true creature of the romance of the sunny South; while the lady of our own southern seas, although she possesses much in common with her Mediterranean sister, has less poetry, but more human sympathy. - The following stories, read in connection with those given by Mr Keightley and by Mr Croker, will show this.

(See "The Fairy Family: a Series of Ballads and Metrical Tales Illustrating the Fairy Mythology of Europe," Longman, 1857; "The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstitions of Various Countries," by Thomas Keightley; and "Irish Fairy Legends," by Crofton Croker.)..." [cont.]

Hunt 1903